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A remote workforce saves money, but it also requires an employee management strategy. The good news is that new tools are making telecommuting easier and helping boost communication, Christina DesMarais writes. One such tool is a cloud-based status platform that gives workers an easy way to keep managers up to date on projects. Several others are designed for project management, and there's also a program that lets managers grab screenshots off workers' PCs at any given time.

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More tech workers are expected to work for themselves in the coming years as an industrywide reluctance to add full-time staff leads to an increased use of contract and temporary employees. Data show that independent workers make up 18% of the tech workforce -- with the technology industry outpacing the labor sector as a whole in the rate of independent worker growth.

Samsung is pioneering a new class of 3D solid-state storage chips that uses special etching technology to stack up to 24 individual cell layers to support capacities as high as 1 TB. The Vertical NAND chips provide 128-bit density and a twofold increase in write performance, said the company, which is the first to mass-produce the new processors.

Declining hardware revenue was blamed as IBM enacted a furlough measure for its U.S.-based hardware division employees. The company's hardware sales were down 12% in the second quarter compared with a year ago. The furlough comes after IBM restructured its workforce in the second quarter and laid off more than 3,300 workers in the U.S. and Canada, Alliance@IBM reported.

Hewlett-Packard's low-power Project Moonshot microservers are receiving increased attention from companies including Facebook and Apple that are looking for more efficient data-center technologies. "That whole list of very big scale-out computing companies are all very interested in this," said HP CEO Meg Whitman. Synapsis, based in Chile, is already deploying the servers.

The idea of massive numbers of workers toiling away from remote locations instead of commuting to the office every day is not exactly a new concept, but thanks to recent advances in mobile and cloud technology, it may finally be sustainable. However, experts say that to make it tenable, companies need to develop strategies to ensure employees avoid the feelings of alienation that often come with telework. More than a third of polled workers who telecommute cite employee camaraderie as the main benefit of working from the office, though some companies are finding that the right mix of flexibility and social networking can help fill in for the water cooler.